5 Steps to Take Before Engaging a Full-Scale Cloud Migration

There are many reasons why you may consider engaging in a full cloud migration, such as the scalability aspect, which can support larger workloads than on-premise infrastructure. Plus, whilst the migration may consume some resources, on-going costs should decrease with this scalability, all whilst performance improves.

Whilst the results are often deemed worthwhile, the process and planning involved can be tricky. For this reason, cloud migration services are often used, particularly for companies that have no personnel with prior experience in cloud migration.

Assess your IT landscape

The first step in your preparation is to simply assess your current IT landscape. This means making a list of all the applications you use, who uses them and how often, and how important they are to the functioning of the business. Which applications depend on others?

Single Cloud or Multi-Cloud?

So the first decision is whether or not you want a single cloud provider, meaning that all of your applications will have to migrate to this single environment or multiple cloud providers. Of course, a single cloud provider in an ideal world has many advantages – just one environment and set of APIs to learn, with onboarding and training being refined. But, this also means being locked in with a single vendor.

It’s also important o decide how you will go about each. For example, do you want a public or private cloud – or a hybrid? For a multi-cloud migration, do you want one application in one cloud whilst another application is in a different cloud, or split your applications across many different clouds?

Cloud KPIs

In order to measure the success of this migration, you will want some key performance indicators to use as standardized metrics for comparison – even if it’s simply a comparison of expectation vs reality. Some ideas for KPIs are: 

• Page load time
• Response time
• Error rates
• Throughput
• Conversions
• Engagement rates

So, decide on various different KPIs before undergoing the migration so that you know what to measure throughout your progress.

Data-Migration Plan

Migrating your data will be one of the most difficult aspects of the cloud migration, and it’s extremely important in regards to speed and security. There are some fundamental options to decide on, such as whether you want on-premise databases that are synchronized one-way to the cloud. You could disable access to this, making the cloud-based database the main one.

You could also use bi-directional synchronization, which is self-explanatory, or you could use a cloud migration service, which is often the simplest and fastest option.

Evaluate Costs

It’s difficult to evaluate costs before all of these decisions have been made, otherwise there’s not enough information to use. However, whether you have a clear budget already in place or not is also important, but ultimately it’s difficult to evaluate these costs as you go per a budget. So, a budget can be decided even at this stage, in which you then evaluate the total cost of the project that is informed by your decided cloud migration plan.